On their final day in Whitehorse, Yukon, in the extreme northwestern region of Canada, rabbinical students Avremy Matusof and Shloimy Stern were sitting with local Rick Karp in the hotel lobby when a young Brit at a nearby table struck up a conversation.
The young man, named Ben, had just completed a grueling, thousand-mile paddle race down the Yukon River. As they spoke, the two students learned that all four of his grandparents were Jewish—yet he had never celebrated his bar mitzvah, nor had he so much as heard of tefillin. When they offered to help him put them on, Ben hesitated. His mother, he worried, would be disappointed to miss the occasion.
Karp, president of the Jewish Cultural Society of Yukon, encouraged him to go ahead anyway. He could wrap tefillin now, in Whitehorse, Karp told him, and celebrate the milestone properly with his mother once he got home. Minutes later, Ben stood in the hotel lobby wearing tefillin for the very first time. The students and Karp danced and threw candy while his teammates snapped photos and video.
Before he left, Ben accepted a package of Jewish items and informational material.
“This is going to come with me down the Yukon River all the way up Alaska,” he told them, “and then I’m bringing this back to London.”
For Karp, a leader in a remote Jewish community, the moment captured something deeper about the whole trip: a Jewish visitor from the United Kingdom had put on tefillin for the first time in his life not in the Jewishly vibrant metropolises of London, Montreal or Toronto, but in Whitehorse.
Looking for Jews in the Unlikeliest of Places
Matusof, 23, of Calgary, Alberta, and Stern, 23, of Brooklyn, N.Y., spent nearly a month of their summer break traveling through northern Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories as participants in the Merkos Shlichut visitation program, which since 1943 has dispatched rabbinical students to Jewish communities with little or no permanent infrastructure throughout the United States and around the globe.
Working under the auspices of Merkos 302 and Chabad-Lubavitch of Alberta, the pair traveled from June 25 through July 21, with stops in Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Whitehorse and Yellowknife. While the program, often dubbed “Roving Rabbis,” had visited northern Alberta on previous summer trips, this was its first foray into the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
The young Chabad rabbis quickly discovered a deep well of Jewish interest in places few would ever expect to find one.
In Fort McMurray, a young Jewish family reached out after seeing the visit publicized on social media. Their children were thrilled to meet the students, the father put on tefillin for the first time, and a mezuzah went up on the family’s front door. The mother and daughter had recently begun lighting Shabbat candles on their own, and Matusof and Stern brought extra candles and informational materials to help them continue.
Elsewhere in Fort McMurray, a Jewish mechanic bought two mezuzahs. At a Canada Day gathering in Grande Prairie, a Jewish woman approached the students and told them about some other Jewish families scattered across the region.
In Whitehorse, the students were welcomed by Karp, a longtime leader of Jewish life in the Yukon and author who contributed to a volume on the territory’s Jewish history, Jewish Presence in the Yukon, Before, During and After the Klondike Gold Rush.
Karp had for years maintained a relationship with Rabbi Menachem Matusof and Chabad of Alberta, arranging for Jewish calendars, shmurah matzah and other staples to be shipped north from Calgary. An in-person visit, though, was something entirely new—Whitehorse is 1,400 miles northwest of Calgary, about a 24 hour drive. Karp acknowledged that he was initially unsure how two visibly Jewish young men would be received.
His concerns began easing almost immediately. At Miles Canyon, Karp and the students had barely stepped out of their car when a passerby called out, “Rabbis! Rabbis!” The man, visiting from Southern California, was overjoyed to run into two Chabad rabbis in the Yukon of all places.
Towards the end of the rabbis’ time in Whitehorse, Karp shared his initial fears at a gathering of about a dozen locals. Rather than the hostility he had worried that their presence might invite, he told the group, he had watched their openly Jewish identity draw both Jews and friendly non-Jews toward them all week long.
Among those at the gathering was a Jewish school principal who drove nearly two hours to attend. For her, it was a second attempt. Once, while traveling through the Canadian Rockies, she had searched for a Chabad center and connected with Rabbi Dovid Pinson of Chabad of the Rockies—but got lost en route and never made it there. She and the rabbi stayed in touch through occasional calls and messages ever since. When she heard Matusof and Stern would be in Whitehorse, she made the two-hour drive to meet them, attending her first-ever gathering of the local Jewish community.
Another attendee, Barbara Curtis of Whitehorse, went to a Jewish overnight camp as a child and still says the Shema prayer nightly. When Matusof and Stern arrived in Whitehorse, her 25-year-old son Aaron put on tefillin for the first time.
“Being in the room with my son Aaron, watching and listening and being part of him putting on tefillin for the very first time,” she related, “I was thinking that my parents would be so happy and proud and as surprised as I was. Never in a million years would I have thought that would happen up here with one of my children.”
A Tanya for Whitehorse
Karp’s involvement deepened as the visit went on. At his home, Matusof and Stern showed him a Tanya, the foundational book of Chassidic philosophy authored by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, that had been printed in the neighboring city of Yellowknife decades earlier. Together they studied several lines from Chapter 32, which discusses the foundation of ahavat Yisrael, “love for one’s fellow Jew.” Karp, surprised that he had never encountered Tanya before, asked the students to send him a large English edition.
“They’ve moved the community to a whole new place,” he later told Alberta Jewish News. “We’ve never had anything like this here before.”
The final leg of the trip brought the young men to Yellowknife, where roughly 15 Jewish locals welcomed them into a private home. The local Jewish society there is still young, its members building infrastructure as they go: developing children’s programming, teaching traditions, arranging shofar-blowing and tashlich for Rosh Hashanah, and gathering children informally for Jewish learning, with the older ones helping teach the younger.
At the gathering, the students displayed the Yellowknife-printed Tanya and played a video of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, teaching a lesson from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement: Every Jew is like precious earth containing stones, diamonds and springs of water. The treasures are already there, waiting beneath the surface; all that’s left is to uncover them.
Recounting their trip, the students were careful not to describe these communities as empty ground onto which they’d brought Jewish identity. The truth, they said, was the opposite: the treasure was already there. Their only task was to fan the flames of inspiration, and help bring it a little closer to the surface.
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